The Identification

Women are tattooed soon after arrival.
This was a shocking greeting for new arrivals. This number was more
important than a family name. ".Auschwitz was the only [camp] to
tattoo prisoners for identification. The underlying cause was the high
death rate among prisoners, which sometimes surpassed several hundred
a day. With such a large number of deaths, there were difficulties in
identifying all the corpses. If the clothes with the camp number were
removed from the corpse, one could no longer establish what the number
of the deceased had been."* Tattooing was done by puncturing the
skin on the left forearm with individual needles and rubbing indelible
ink into the bleeding wounds.